Hidden in these Pennsylvania woods is a place that should not be here, and almost no one remembers what was here before it.

We met one individual on horseback who believed firmly that these were built by aliens.

Hard to dissuade him of that, but no, they weren't.

What we're looking at is one of 149 Corbetta-style igloos built about 80 years ago, prior to World War II, in order to house ammunition, house TNT.

Each of these structures was capable of holding 250,000 pounds of TNT in 50-pound boxes.

I was in awe.

We opened up one of the doors, walked in, and it was like an echo chamber in there, all concrete.

Every footstep reverberates three or four times.

It is very difficult to hold a conversation in there.

And the hole in the roof, so the explosion would go up if there were one.

The War Department, as it was called back then, needed an area to build its TNT plants that was close to rail transportation, that was close to a river, that was near highways, and was relatively flat.

And a place like this in central Pennsylvania, rural central Pennsylvania, was really perfect for the needs of the War Department.

But this was not empty land.

Before the bunkers, before the forest, there was Elvira.

People who don't know this area would probably have no idea, as you look around now at the trees and the overgrowth, that at one point, this was absolutely pristine farmland.

The village of Elvira was an agricultural center for Lycoming County.

Previously, it had been a thriving village.

Thriving.

And then, in 1942, the people of Elvira were told to leave.

The people had six weeks to gather up all their belongings and leave their properties and find somewhere else to be.

They received about 35 cents on the dollar for their homes and land.

And if you're getting 35 cents on the dollar, chances are you're not going to have enough money to buy another property.

They bulldozed and burned.

Martha's is exactly correct.

They came in with bulldozers, they came in with torch machines, and sometimes dynamited.

But just took everything off the face of the earth in a year.

One of the most poignant parts of this story for us is to think about how kids must have reacted to that kind of change in their lives.

Not only was the community destroyed, the community of Elvira, neighboring towns of Deckerstown and Somerset, but friendships were destroyed.

Church gatherings were destroyed.

All of it was erased for a wartime project that would last less than a year.

Another misconception is that this was a five - year project.

From the time it began, the first TNT rolled off a production line until the day the ordinance closed.

It was exactly 11 months.

Generations lost their families, lost their homes, lost their land for 11 months worth of activity.

That land that they lost had been promised to be returned to them when the war was over.

That did not happen.

Today, almost nothing remains of Elvira, except a few traces on the land and the people buried here.

Even today, this place holds the echoes of the words and deeds of the people who lived here.

No one has lived here for 80 years, but you can often hear their voices.

Places like Elvira disappeared twice, first from the land and then from memory.

If the story is not told, the history is not remembered.

If the story is not told, the people are not remembered.

Telling the story is maintaining a trust with the past and creating a perspective toward the future.